Science and Engineering

> Sorgfelt

Diamonds and other Crystals

Nuclear Battery. Why This Nuclear Engineer Says Every Nuke Plant in the US Should Be Shut Down Yesterday. The good—the very good—energy news is that the Indian Point nuclear power plants 26 miles north of New York City will be closed in the next few years under an agreement reached between New York State and the plants’ owner, Entergy.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has long been calling for the plants to be shut down because, as the New York Times related in its story on the pact, they pose “too great a risk to New York City.” Environmental and safe-energy organizations have been highly active for decades in working for the shutdown of the plants. Under the agreement, one Indian Point plant will shut down by April 2020, the second by April 2021. "If the general public would see these secret 'red' reports, its view on nuclear power would turn strongly negative.

"They would be among the many nuclear power plants in the U.S. which their owners have in recent years decided to close or have announced will be shut down in a few years.

Atmosphere and Toxins. Geology and Geophysics. Chemistry. Physical Review Letters. Loop quantum gravity. More precisely, space can be viewed as an extremely fine fabric or network "woven" of finite loops. These networks of loops are called spin networks. The evolution of a spin network over time is called a spin foam. The predicted size of this structure is the Planck length, which is approximately 10−35 meters.

According to the theory, there is no meaning to distance at scales smaller than the Planck scale. Therefore, LQG predicts that not just matter, but also space itself has an atomic structure. Today LQG is a vast area of research, developing in several directions, which involves about 50 research groups worldwide.[1] They all share the basic physical assumptions and the mathematical description of quantum space.

Research into the physical consequences of the theory is proceeding in several directions. History[edit] General covariance and background independence[edit]
How to Make a Metamaterial that Expands Under Pressure and Contracts In Tension. Challenge Browser. The Tracking and Tracing Books Prize Competition seeks innovations to track books destined for early-grade classrooms and learning centers in low-income countries and allow stakeholders, ranging from parents to Ministries of Education and donor agencies, to quickly and easily access tracking information.

There are three phases to this Prize Competition.
Asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth in 2013. A near-Earth asteroid swept safely past Earth on February 15, 2013, and astronomers in many parts of the world were ready with cameras and video equipment. At its closest to us, asteroid 2012 DA14 was within the orbit of the moon (which averages about a quarter million miles away), and closer than some high-orbiting communications satellites.
World Peace, Global Politics and the Hydrogen Bomb. The Real Nuclear Threat.

But a new kind of all-carbon solar cell developed by MIT researchers could tap into that unused energy, opening up the possibility of combination solar cells — incorporating both traditional silicon-based cells and the new all-carbon cells — that could make use of almost the entire range of sunlight’s energy.
A Better Way to Get Hydrogen from Water. An experimental approach to splitting water might lead to a relatively cheap and clean method for large-scale hydrogen production that doesn’t require fossil fuels.

The process splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using heat and catalysts made from inexpensive materials. Heat-driven water splitting is an alternative to electrolysis, which is expensive and requires large amounts of electricity. The new approach, developed by Caltech chemical-engineering professor Mark Davis, avoids the key problems with previous heat-driven methods of water splitting.

Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has received $70 million to commercialize technology that uses microörganisms to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel.
Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out. Casey Pfiefer, Structural Engineer with a Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering, with 15 years of experience. David Topete, licenced Structural Engineer with a Masters of Science in Civil Engineering.